Sunday, June 11, 2017

The Hockey Stick and Breitbart

There are few things that will get anti-science climate
change deniers in a froth more quickly than bringing up the hockey stick. Maybe it’s because the hockey stick shows, without
question, that global warming is real. The graph even leads to the conclusion,
with no other data necessary, that it’s caused by humans.

The nickname is a result of the shape of the graph showing
average global temperatures for the last several centuries. There was a gradual
downward trend following the end of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) in the 14th
century until a very large upturn in the late-19th century. Here is
the original graph:

As you can see, there is no comparable uptick in temperature
anywhere else in the graph and this change occurred as our industrial complexes
were expanding, strongly indicating this uptick was caused by us. Of course,
further research was needed to confirm this result. That research has been done
and the hockey stick has been confirmed by multiple studies.

[UPDATE: For an excellent review of how completely false the Notrickzone article is go here. I particularly like the summary:

We rank the claims made by both Breitbart and No Tricks Zone as false,
because they dramatically misrepresent the findings of the scientists
who conducted the research and utilize poorly-articulated straw man
arguments to further misrepresent the significance of the work of
those scientists. These studies were local in nature, narrowin
scope, meant to address how the climate system functioned in the past,
and pose no threat to the tenets of anthropogenic climate change.

Thanks to jmac for providing the link.]

It doesn’t take long to see what the problem is with this
article, namely cherry picking. Cherry picking is selecting data to support
your predetermined conclusion and ignoring data that doesn’t. Take a quick
look at the article and you’ll see graphs for the western Mediterranean, the
Spanish Pyrenees, northern Spain,
Arctic summer temperatures, South
China Sea, Alberta, Scotland, and more. In other words,
the author of this piece went and found scientific papers that discussed some
aspect of temperature for some given region and he then expanded it to mean
global warming.

There’s two huge problems with this. The first is that we
are discussing ‘global’ warming, not ‘Alberta’
warming. There’s the cherry picking. Given global warming, it is a fact of the
laws of thermodynamics that some areas will actually see a cooling trend. As
more heat is stored in the atmosphere, more work will be done. Weather can only
occur when there is a temperature difference between regions. So, as more work
is done in the form of weather, it is required that some areas be warmer than
others. That is why we focus on global averages. We want to know what is
happening to the entire planet. What is happening in the Spanish Pyrenees is
important and is a worthwhile thing to study, but it doesn’t fall under the
definition of ‘global’ warming.

The other problem is that some of these graphs, showing
temperature trends for limited regions instead of global averages, still show
the hockey stick is present, even for the isolated region in question. The author
of this article is trying to prove the hockey stick isn’t real by showing
examples of it actually existing. And, I’m sure he has no problem with that
logic.

I’m not the only one to find this article doesn’t pass any
kind of scientific muster. You can read a much better review, conducted by five
scientists, here.

This is just another giant cherry pick by
"nottickszone" of the earths average annual air temperature. These
cherry picks are typical of "notrickszone" and other denier blogs.
Nobody has said that every region of the earth will warm at the same rate.

“Global warming” means Earth's average annual air
temperature is rising, but not necessarily in every single location during all
seasons across the globe.

"Temperature trends across the entire globe aren’t uniform because of the
diverse geography on our planet—oceans versus continents, lowlands versus
mountains, forests versus deserts versus ice sheets—as well as natural climate
variability. When you’re zoomed in on a particular place, you may not be able
to see the overall trend.

It is only when scientists calculate the average of temperature changes from
every place on Earth over the course of a year to produce a single number, and
then look at how that number has changed over time that a very clear, global
warming trend emerges. In other words, it’s only when we “zoom out” to the
planet-wide scale that the trend is obvious: despite a few, rare areas
experiencing an overall cooling trend, the vast majority of places across the
globe are warming.https://www.climate.gov/sit...
Observed trend in temperature from 1900 to 2012; yellow to red indicates
warming, while shades of blue indicate cooling. Gray indicates areas for which
there are no data. There are substantial regional variations in trends across
the planet, though the overall trend is warming. Map from FAQ appendix of the
2014 National Climate Assessment. Originally provided by NOAA NCDC.

The reason a “zoomed out” view makes the long-term trend so clear is that
Earth's annual average temperatures from year to year are found to be very stable
when nothing is forcing it to change. Today, though, every decade since 1960
has been warmer than the last, and the last three decades each have been the
warmest on record. Relative to geologic time, the warming that has
occurred—1.5°F (0.85°C) over a span of 100 years—is an unusually large
temperature change in a relati vely short span of time.

However, not all land masses and oceans have experienced or will experience a
constant, identical rate of warming. Natural variations in our climate system
cause temperatures to vary from region to region and from time to time, leaving
sporadic fingerprints in the long-term temperature record. When you consider
the global map above, you can see that in a few parts of the world temperature
trends were basically ”flat” over the last century."

In conclusion, I have to wonder why this guy would write an
article that is so easily debunked. I guess there are people who will believe
anything that affirms their hatred of science, but why would you be willing to make
such a fool of yourself in the process? But, then again, I guess that's what they specialize in at Breitbart.